Documenting the wage gap based on motherhood in many countries, including the United States, the OECD tells the sorry maternal tale in stark numbers.

In the U.S., the wage gap between men and women without children is only seven percent.

Have your first child on American soil, however, and the wage gap rockets to 23%.

That's not, however, the worst economic news for mothers. The impact of the gender wage gap over a mother's lifetime is dramatic.

Having worked less in formal employment, but having carried out much more unpaid work at home, many women will retire on lower pensions and see out their final years in poverty. Living an average of nearly 6 years longer than men, women over 65 are today more than one and a half times more likely to live in poverty than men in the same age bracket.

Let me say that again.

Women over 65 today are more than one and a half times more likely to live in poverty than men in the same age bracket.

We know most women no longer have the luxury to tend to child-rearing duties full time. But working with children at home compounds the wretched harvest of most mothers' lifetime labor.

As the OECD reports, 65% of an American family’s second wage is spent on childcare. For single mothers, of course, that's 65% of a first wage.

If you've never experienced poverty, or, like me, remember mostly the good times despite it, run on over A Woman's Placewhere they're covering the close ofNational Poverty Awareness Monthby asking their readers to play Spent, an online game that focuses on poverty and homelessness.

AWP's Communication manager, Jacalyn Hartzell, played the game juggling necessities the way I recall doing, though I never had the burden of caretaking children while poor. It's an illuminating and frightening post, particularly when you recall that for nearly 44 million Americans, the "game" is real.

Why We Work The High End of the Food Chain

We at She Negotiates are working at the top of the corporate, professional and entrepreneurial food chain not simply to bring wage parity to the most successful working women, but to put those women into leadership positions across all civil sectors.

Feminists have been fighting for child care since the first strike for women's equality in 1970. We're forty years down the road and little closer to the goal of affordable childcare for working women than we were back when gender discrimination was legal.

It seems pretty clear that we will not achieve equality of opportunity until we bring women into the power structure across all professions, in all businesses, throughout government, and in all civic institutions.

We at She Negotiates see moving high potential and high-powered women into greater positions of greater responsibility and leadership as tantamount to the airline injunction to put your breathing mask over your own nose and mouth before you turn to put masks on your children.

In the absence of genuine economic and political power, "women's" issues will continue to languish unattended (or to be hostility opposed).

Whether your mother will spend her elder years in poverty or your sisters and children will spend theirs in want and diminished opportunity is really up to us, the women.

Toward that goal, I've joined the Board of Directors of The New Agenda whose mission includes putting women's boots heels on the ground to raise more of our voices on behalf of ourselves, our children, our sisters and our mothers in the halls of power, both economic and political.